Newtown Municipal Center, selectmen's meeting. Selectmen (facing camera) James Gaston left, William Rodgers, right, and First Selectwoman E. Patricia Llodra, center, listen to Dan LePage of Middletown, vice-president of Punishers LEMC Connecticut Chapter, a motorcycle club. LePage said his club is interested in running a charity ride later in the year for Newtown. LePage's wife Lesa is at right. Mara Lavitt/New Haven Register1/7/13

NEWTOWN -- Most of the time, the big room with chairs set up in front of a U-shaped table with microphones is the council chamber in the Town Hall building on the campus of the former Fairfield Hills State Hospital.

But on Monday night, as the three-member Board of Selectmen met for only the second time since the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, it was clear that the room also was being used for a higher purpose.

Glittery, little shimmering plastic stars and tiny remnants of cut paper -- the latter, a byproduct of thousands of snowflakes made by schoolchildren across the country and shipped to Newtown -- were a big hint.

Then there were the dozens of green, hard plastic "Newtown Recycles" bins lined up on chairs and the flood around the perimeter of the room -- each containing prayer cards and mail from all over the nation and the world for various town officials and institutions, including the Police Department, PTA, school board, area churches and the Sandy Hook Volunteer Fire & Rescue Co.

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Some contain checks for families of the deceased, including the 20 children and six staff members fatally shot by Adam Lanza on Dec. 14, as well as the family of Nancy Lanza and the son who shot and killed her.

"Let me apologize in advance for the mess in this room," said First Selectwoman E. Patricia Llodra as she opened the meeting. "We are trying to sort" an estimated 75,000 pieces of mail, she said, "and this is the room.

"We don't have a vacuum, so we're sitting amongst the glitter" scattered across the carpet, she said.

It's no easy job -- even with dozens of volunteers working 20 at a time in two-hour shifts in a mammoth operation being coordinated by volunteer Anna Widemann -- Llodra said at the meeting, which also dealt with more mundane, if recently ignored issues related to running the town.

Selectman William Rodgers said before the meeting that the first time the board met after the shootings, which was just a few days after, it skipped over many of the items on the agenda and kept it very short.

"We're taking great care" to correctly sort and catalog the 75,000-plus pieces of mail, which arrived at Town Hall in 15 huge U.S. Postal Service bins now stored in the building, Llodra said.

"There were bins and bins of mail," she said, and it must be sorted carefully because a number of those thousands of envelopes contain checks, all of which must be accounted for, cataloged and correctly distributed.

The good thing is, between the regular folks who have already come forward -- plus some specialized help from the post office -- there are plenty of volunteers, and no, the town doesn't need any more, Llodra said after the meeting.

She said she hopes that the volunteers can get through it all within the next week.

As with many things going on in Newtown in the wake of the tragedy, the volunteer mail brigade is part of the silver lining, Llodra said.

"Out of every horrible thing, I believe good things happen -- and one of the good things" in Newtown is that "spirit of volunteerism" that has risen to the top over the past three-plus weeks, she said during the meeting.

"So we're blessed in many ways," Llodra said. "We've been hurt badly, but we're blessed. ... The world has been tremendously generous to us," she said.